Senior product designer at GIPHY. Takes photos, makes things move, & writes code. Father of kittens. Enjoys the great outdoors. Human Being in Brooklyn. Holds a Bachelor of Design degree from Penn State. This website is a collection of things that I'm mostly not working on while at work.

For three months in the Spring of 2015 I had a stay with the homies at Dark Igloo, & they were a few of the most outrageously cool months of my life. Dark Igloo, run by Dave Franzese & Mark Miller is a company that specializes. I joined the team as an Eskimo. During our hang I got to work on cool things for places like Giphy, Kong, & Converse while also helping create internal virtual realities of the future, with Self-E-Wear.

One of the first things I was asked to do was to photograph the studio. I was ecstatic. In their own words, Dark Igloo is...a friendship that became a house, a house that became a company, and a company that wrote a sentence about itself. Here's the house.

Despite taking three or four hundred shots of the studio and not being quite done shooting (let alone editing), there was some real work to be done. Kong is a recently launched app developed by Path that asked Dark Igloo to put together some promotional videos. What this really meant is that we spent a week or two taking selfies with our phones showing off various features, like "Be your selfie" or "Having fun".

I also create an animation for their logo.

Throughout the whole experience various stuff was being worked on for Giphy. We put together a video of an April Fools joke titled "GIFt Delivery" alongside a cheesey craptastic companion website that I designed/coded/goofed with, made a bunch of wallpapers, worked on a Gif-Jockey vj'ing app (still in development), and touched tips.

The largest production of my time at the igloo was Self-E-Wear...large enough to have its own project page! Here are the cliffs–Self-E-Wear is the only VR headset with the power to show you how cool you look wearing a VR headset. Equal parts interactive art piece, futurist dance party, and waiting in line at Space Mountain. Designed and built from scratch, the team at Dark Igloo debuted it at F5 Fest to huge smiles and several noise violations. I designed/coded its promo website and took photos at the launch event.

The summer wrapped up with a series of promotional shorts for Converse's line of water proof shoes, the Rubber Collection. I was involved in set production and behind the scenes photos.
Take a look at the Igloo's page with more videos and footage!

My time at Dark Igloo was killer, and we achieved a whole bunch of squad goals and grandma slices. I parted with a Dave-original illustration of my cat getting stuck in one of our Converse tubes & got to start my Igloo pin collection.